Hingham Historical Lecture Series Starts This Weekend

Starting this weekend, the Hingham Historical Society will host a series of lectures on the theme of “Native Homelands/Settler Colonialism.”

The talks will take place on Sunday afternoons at the Hingham Heritage Museum but also on Zoom. Some of the speakers will be present, and others speaking from their homes.

Launching the series on Sunday, 23 September, is Prof. Alan Taylor speaking about “Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the American Revolution.”

Taylor is one of the most respected historians of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America today, as well as one of the most productive. Originally from Maine, he wrote The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution in 2006. Taylor won Pulitzer Prizes for William Cooper’s Town in 1996 and The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 in 2014.

Here are the upcoming talks.

• 6 November: Robert Miller, “The International Law of Colonialism and New England”
• 4 December: David S. Jones, “Epidemics, Conflict, and Caregiving during the Colonization of New England” 
• 22 January 2023: Virginia D. Anderson, “Native Americans, English Colonists, and Strange Beasts” 
• 26 March: Jean M. O’Brien, “Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence”
• 23 April: Lisa Brooks, “A New History of King Philip’s War”

A subscription to all six lectures in person or by video costs $175, or $150 for Hingham Historical Society members.

John Dickinson Symposium in Philadelphia, 20–21 Oct.

To celebrate the publication of the first volumes of The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia is hosting a free “John Dickinson Symposium: New Perspectives on the American Founding.”

This symposium will begin on the evening of Thursday, 20 October, with a plenary address by Jack N. Rakove: “John Dickinson, Political Conscience, and the Dilemma of the Moderates.”

The panel discussions scheduled for the following day show the wide range of issues Dickinson addressed and contributions he made:

Communication

• Jelte Olthof, “John Dickinson: Pluralist and Orator”
• Helena Yoo, “Letters from Before He Became a Farmer: John Dickinson’s Transatlantic Correspondence”
• David Forte, “‘Like Lightening thro the Land’: John Dickinson and the Freedom of the Press”

Matters of State

• Charlotte Crane, “Contribution and Representation: John Dickinson’s Contributions to the Fiscal Design of the Emerging Federal Government”
• Charles Fithian, “‘A System, concise, easy and efficient’: John Dickinson’s Version of von Steuben’s Regulations for the Delaware Militia, 1782”
• Nathan R. Kozuskanich, “‘A Certain Coldness in my Presbyterian Friends’: Dickinson and the Pennsylvania Radicals”

Social Justice

• Jon Kershner, “‘Nature Planted Them in this Land’: John Dickinson’s Quakerly Diplomacy and Indian Concerns”
• Kevin Bendesky, “‘Defending the Innocent & redressing the injurd’: The Criminal Jurisprudence and Penology of John Dickinson”
• Jane E. Calvert, “Black Freedom and Its Limits in the Thought of John Dickinson”

Gender and Social Concerns

• James Emmett Ryan, “John Dickinson and Public Education”
• Rebecca Brannon, “John Dickinson and Aging”
• Nathaniel Green, “‘From a Common Stock of Rights’: Human Rights and Political Power in John Dickinson’s America”

And that doesn’t even get into the man’s songwriting.

Two years ago, after the very first volume of Dickinson’s collected writings appeared, the Library Company of Philadelphia hosted a smaller, online event. But of course late 2020 was a time for online events. This symposium is the first time these scholars will be gathered in the same place.

A Visit to Fort Stanwix

A combination of travel, illness, and lack of connectivity kept me from posting on my usual daily schedule this weekend, so I’m catching up with some of the places I passed through in central New York.

First up is Fort Stanwix in the city of Rome. I visited this site once before, in the 1990s. It’s impressive to see an eighteenth-century wooden fortification, built to high standards of authenticity, in the middle of a modern city.

Of course, location was the point of Fort Stanwix—it commanded an important portage point in the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars. It provided a base for protecting the nascent U.S. of A.’s furthest northwest settlements. The city of Rome grew up around it.

And location was also the point of the reconstruction—it was an urban-renewal project. The land was designated as a National Monument back in 1935, when it was still covered with apartment buildings and shops. In the 1960s, Rome city leaders decided a recreated fort would be better for tourism, and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy threw his weight behind the project.

The somewhat dragooned National Park Service offered a master plan in 1967. From 1970 to 1973 it oversaw archeological work, and from 1974 to 1978 the fort went up. Though there’s a reinforced concrete structure, most of what we see is earth and wood.

Fort Stanwix was besieged by Crown forces starting on 3 Aug 1777. To commemorate that period, the park flies a flag based on period sources—thirteen red, white, and blue stripes with no canton or stars.

I was there on a summer Monday. The visitor center was closed. Only one interpretive ranger was on site at a time. A thin but steady stream of visitors suggests that the park could attract more people on summer Mondays with more programming, but of course that costs money.

Some parts of the fort were recently rebuilt, I learned, but the contractor who’d won the bid to haul away the old lumber went out of business during the pandemic. Now there are big piles of logs on the grounds waiting to be removed. That heavy hauling job has to go through the federal hiring process again, following rules designed to protect our public interest but also subject to slowness.

The present park site is thus a memorial to both the wars of the eighteenth century and the expansive, can-do attitude of the Kennedy decade.

The Stinking Waters and George R. T. Hewes

As I type this, I’m in Richfield Springs, New York. In fact, I’m right across East Main Street (Route 20) from the springs that gave the town its name.

Those are sulphur springs, and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) referred to this place as Ganowauges, or “stinking waters.”

Europeans learned about the springs by the early 1750s, and British troops reached the site in 1757 during the French and Indian War. But there was still very little European settlement in the area two decades later when Adam Helmer ran past.

I heard about Richfield Springs first because of its connection to one memorable Revolutionary Bostonian: George Robert Twelves Hewes.

During the siege Hewes lost his shoemaking workshop in Boston and resettled with his family in Wrentham. That change may have helped to cement his memories of the pre-war port.

Later some of Hewes’s children, like many rural New Englanders, moved out to central New York. In the early 1800s the area around Richfield Springs was being developed, with the sulphur water itself promoted as a health remedy.

After the War of 1812, Hewes and his wife Sally followed those children to Richfield Springs. He was then seventy-four years old and ready to retire. Sally Hewes died in 1828. For the next few years, Hewes moved among the houses of relatives and neighbors, telling stories about the Revolution and pulling out his old militia uniform for patriotic holidays.

Some of Hewes’s Independence Day talks came to the attention of a New York writer named James Hawkes, who wrote a biography collecting those tales. The term “Boston Tea Party” had been coined a few years before, and Hawkes titled his 1834 book A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party.

That publication spurred Boston grandees to invite Hewes to revisit his home town, which he did in 1835. He sat for a portrait and for celebratory dinners. Since of course we couldn’t be satisfied with a book written by a New Yorker, local writer Benjamin Bussey Thatcher pumped Hewes for more stories, augmented them with other men’s recollections, and published Traits of the Tea Party.

Hewes returned to central New York, having thoroughly enjoyed being a celebrity. In 1840 he was boarding a carriage to ride to yet another Independence Day celebration when he suffered an injury. Hewes died on 5 November at the age of ninety-eight and was buried here in Richfield Springs.

“Extensive swamps of bitumen”

Yesterday I visited the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, which occasions this short posting about events far from New England.

While Bostonians spent 1769 continuing to complain about British soldiers stationed in town, the Spanish official Gaspar de Portola led an expedition north from Mexico.

On 3 August the Franciscan friar Juan Crespi wrote in his diary of that journey:

We proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote.

We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes.

The locals who had made that “good road” had used the tar for thousands of years to waterproof baskets, mend pottery, decorate jewelry, and more. But this was the first time Europeans had seen the tar pits.

In 1781, the year that the British, American, and French forces fought the decisive siege of Yorktown, Gov. De Portola founded a colonial settlement called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles.

That settlement grew into the city of Los Angeles. It contained the tar pits, which locals continued to mine for building material, then to drill for oil, and now explore for fossils and host countless school field trips.

A New Board and a New Vote in San Francisco

Back in 2019 I wrote a couple of postings about the San Francisco Board of Education’s vote to digitally archive and then destroy the New Deal murals depicting the first President in the city’s George Washington High School.

The ironies of the Life of Washington murals case made it stand out from other disputes about public art featuring historic figures. For one thing, the painter, Victor Arnautoff, was quite critical of Washington’s treatment of enslaved Africans and dispossessed Native Americans. That meant the right-wing arousal media went into its usual frenzy to defend art by a Founder-bashing Communist.

For another, the students at Washington High School seemed largely okay with the murals, to the extent that anyone had asked them.

After a few months the board changed its vote to preserve the murals but conceal them. An alumni group sued to keep the art on view, and in 2021 a judge ruled that the board hadn’t performed an environmental impact review before ordering the change.

That ruling puzzled me for a couple of reasons. First, most of the board’s original financial allocation for removing the mural was in fact for an environmental study. And second, what unusual environmental impact would paint or curtains have on a high school?

A little research tells me that the California Environmental Quality Act actually includes “cultural resources” among the factors that an agency must assess before a project, so the name “environmental impact review” is a little limiting. And the judge’s main point was that the board should have done that review before deciding to cover the mural and not the other way around.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco school board plunged into other controversial initiatives, including renaming schools on occasionally shaky historical grounds and ending test-based admissions at one. There was an election, then a recall election earlier this year, and finally three recalled board members replaced with mayoral appointees. The vote to recall those three board members was overwhelming; on the other hand, the total number of votes was far less than in the last school board election.

Last month the reconstituted board voted 4–3 to reverse its plan to alter the Life of Washington murals. That doesn’t mean the issue is settled forever. After all, people have been criticizing how these paintings depict black and Native figures since the late 1960s. But I suspect the issue won’t come up again for another generation.

The Progress of Dr. James Graham

Dr. James Graham disembarked in Baltimore late in the summer of 1769.

Graham had been born in Edinburgh twenty-four years before, son of a saddler. He had enough resources and drive to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, though not enough to finish a degree. But he was tall, good-looking, and extremely interested in new ideas.

Before turning twenty, Graham set himself up as an apothecary in Yorkshire and married. But soon he left his wife and surviving young child to explore prospects in the American colonies, perhaps looking for a place for the family to settle.

In January 1770, Dr. Graham advertised a “Lecture on the Eye” in Annapolis. Such lectures were a way to establish his bona fides and attract patients. The advertisements Graham placed, Lydia Syson found in writing his biography, are the best way to track him in North America.

From August to November 1770, Graham promoted his talks and services in New York City, again emphasizing expertise on the eye and ear. By October 1771 he had moved on to Philadelphia. According to an article in Therapeutic Advances in Ophthalmology, Graham was the first specialist documented as using the term “glaucoma” in America. He also added music to his public lectures.

While in the colonies’ largest city, Dr. Graham also spent some of his time “attending the public Exhibitions and Lectures on Electricity” at the local college. Ebenezer Kinnersley, officially steward and professor of English and oratory, performed electrical demonstrations for the public based on Benjamin Franklin’s famous discoveries.

Interestingly, Graham also later claimed that he had learned medical secrets from “Indians” while in America. I’m not sure what these secrets were.

In the autumn of 1772, the doctor did a swing through the Pennsylvania towns of Lancaster, York, and Reading. By this time he was announcing that he could perform cataract operations and fit prosthetic eyes. The doctor was in New York again the following summer and Baltimore in November 1773.

Graham then sailed back to Britain and his family. He later wrote, “I returned to England at the commencement of the eternal downfall of European power in America!” That was a radical political statement, but it’s impossible to know how politics affected his decision to return home during the tea crisis.

Dr. James Graham set up a new practice in Bristol in May 1774, spent a month or so in fashionable Bath at the start of the next year, and went to London in February 1775.

By then he had accumulated enough testimonials to his medical skills to publish them in a pamphlet titled Thoughts on the Present State of the Practice of Disorders in the Eye and the Ear, combined with An Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain. Late in 1775 he advertised the following success rate from February to October:

cures or relieved, 281
refused as incurable on their first Application, 317
after a short Trial (by desire) found incurable, 47
dismissed for Neglect, etc. 57
country, foreign, and other Patients, events unknown, 381.

It’s striking that Graham claimed to have cured only about a quarter of the people he saw, fewer than he had immediately sent away.

One of the people who read Graham’s writings was the author Catharine Macaulay. She turned forty-five in 1776 and had long worried about her health. Between 1763 and 1771 she had completed five volumes of her History of England, but she had been struggling with the sixth for half a decade. Macaulay decided to consult this Dr. Graham.

TOMORROW: Testimonials and travel.

“Underrepresented Voices” Conference in Boston, 14–16 July

The Massachusetts Historical Society has announced details of its upcoming conference on “Underrepresented Voices of the American Revolution,” to take place over three days from 14 to 16 July.

The conference introduction says:

In recent decades, scholars have unearthed and revived stories of a diverse and wide-ranging cast of characters who lived through America’s political formation. This much-needed corrective has unraveled a traditional narrative of wealthy white male revolutionaries rebelling against a white male dominated imperial government.

The lead up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence offers an opportunity to highlight and share the latest scholarship on the topic of underrepresented voices of the American Revolution whether that be from the perspective of Native Americans, women, African Americans, loyalists, ethnic and religious minorities, children, or neutrals in a global war that put the question of representation at its core. This conference will bring together scholars to explore the broad themes associated with historic individuals or groups not traditionally considered in discussing the American Revolutionary Era.

The program for Thursday, 14 July, will take place at the M.H.S., starting in the afternoon. There will be one panel with two papers, a reception, and finally keynote remarks by Profs. Colin Calloway, Kathleen DuVal, and Chernoh Sesay. This part of the conference is free to all who register.

On Friday, 15 July, the action will move to Sargent Hall at Suffolk University. This full day’s program consists of four sessions, each with two panels featuring two to four academic papers and discussion (P.D.F. download of the full schedule). Registration for both Thursday and Friday costs $30.

Finally, on 16 July, K-12 teachers can participate in a full-day workshop led by Prof. Chernoh Sesay, Prof. (and former schoolteacher) G. Patrick O’Brien, master teachers, and M.H.S. education staff. The goals will be to “identify important takeaways from the conference, reflect on the accessibility of current scholarship for the K-12 classroom, and discuss best practices for introducing the major themes of the conference to our students.” Participants will have a chance to develop their own instructional materials in collaboration with scholars and fellow educators. This day also costs $30.

Online Talks about Patriots of Color and Their Legacy

This month, the Boston Public Library and the National Park Service are teaming up for two online events that look at the Revolutionary War and its legacy.

Tuesday, 12 April, 6:00–7:00 P.M.
Patriots of Color
online

More than 2,100 men of color from Massachusetts served the Patriot cause during the American Revolution. They served as militiamen in emergencies, and as professional soldiers who marched in campaigns from Boston to Saratoga, from Monmouth to Yorktown.

As the nation plans for its 250th anniversary, join National Parks of Boston staff and interns as they share their emerging research that explores select life stories of Patriots of Color during and long after they served on the Revolutionary battlefields.

Register for this event through this link on this page.

Tuesday, 26 April, 6:00–7:00 P.M.
Connecting Past, Present, and Future: The Descendants of Darby Vassall on the Legacy of Slavery and Freedom
online

In 1774, the family of Darby Vassall—enslaved in Cambridge and surrounding towns—seized their freedom. Vassall dedicated the rest of his life to the struggle for freedom, education, and equality for greater Boston’s black community.

In this virtual program, join Vassall’s descendants for a conversation on the significance of surfacing the past, present, and future. Members of the Lloyd family and other descendants will reflect on the process of finding their ancestors’ history, and the critical importance of making this history—of the legacy of slavery, the value of freedom, and the beauty of the struggle—known to this and future generations.

Staff from the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site and other historical organizations will also briefly discuss collaborative efforts to research and memorialize the legacy of the Vassall family and slavery in greater Boston.

Register through this page.

Revolutionary Lectures from Five Different Years

This has been a busy week in video events for me. I delivered two live talks, video-chatted with the Mount Vernon Book Group, and recorded a story for an upcoming National Park Service project.

Meanwhile, videos of several older events got posted. So if you have nothing else to watch on this weekend—after all, it’s just the basketball and the movie awards—here are some video links.

The Dedham Museum & Archive recorded the talks that Katie Turner Getty, Christian Di Spigna, and I delivered earlier this month on 6 March. Katie spoke about women at the Boston Massacre, Christian about Dr. Joseph Warren’s career, and I about the evidence and unanswered questions about Crispus Attucks. We also fielded audience questions. So be aware, the video of this “Revolutionary Martyrs” program runs about an hour and forty-five minutes.

The Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site has posted the videos of four lectures I delivered around Evacuation Day in recent years. The National Park Service works to ensure all its videos are accessible to people with limited sight or hearing, so these include captions and descriptions.

I started delivering Evacuation Day lectures at Washington’s Headquarters several years ago when I was working on a historic resource study for the agency. At first I drew on chapters from that study. Later I started to pull out stories spread out over several chapters, or topics on which I’d found new material. Looking back, I’m surprised I’ve found so much to say.

• 2017: “Washington’s Riflemen: Heroes or Headaches?”
• 2018: “Myths and Realities of Col. Henry Knox’s First Mission”
• 2019: “When John & Abigail Met George: The Adamses’ Encounters with Washington”
• 2020: “Native Americans at the Siege of Boston”

Each of these presentations was about an hour long, with questions at the end. They were made possible by the Friends of Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters and the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati. Enjoy.

“Revolutionary Martyrs” Panel in Framingham, 4 Mar.

There won’t be a reenactment of the Boston Massacre outside the Old State House this year, but there will be other, mostly indoor events commemorating that 1770 milestone. And I’m involved in some of them, including this one.

Friday, 4 March, 7:00 P.M.
Boston’s Revolutionary Martyrs
Framingham History Center

The Boston Massacre is one of the most famous events in American history, but many details about the episode remain mysterious. Was it really the first fatal violence of the Revolution? What do we know about the most famous victim, Crispus Attucks? How many victims ultimately died from the shooting? Was the famous Massacre engraving really designed by Paul Revere? How did Revolutionary leaders like Dr. Joseph Warren keep the memory of the Massacre alive? And how did the idea of martyrdom shape the cause of American liberty?

This event will consist of three presentations followed by a question-and-answer period. The panelists will be:

• Katie Turner Getty, speaking on women at the Massacre. All the soldiers and all the people shot were male, but women were also on the scene and testified about what they experienced. 
• me, J. L Bell, talking about Crispus Attucks, a native of Framingham. What clues can we glean about his life from the record of 1770, and what additional sources and theories have surfaced in recent years? 
• Christian Di Spigna, author of a biography of Dr. Joseph Warren, speaking on the annual orations in Boston that honored the Massacre’s martyrs and how the only two-time orator became a martyr himself.

Also on hand will be the Henry Knox Color Guard, who will demonstrate musket firing on the town common. Inside the Framingham History Center will be a one-night display including a full-scale replica of John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Warren, a portion of the doctor’s missing medical ledger, and the doctor’s Bible, now owned by the Massachusetts Freemasons.

This panel discussion was organized by the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation to observe the anniversary of Warren’s first oration about the˜ Massacre in 1772. Other sponsoring organizations include the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, the Massachusetts Freemasons, and Revolution 250.

Tickets for this event are $15 to benefit the Framingham History Center. There are no plans to put the presentations online live. To register, follow the instructions on the Framingham History Center webpage.

(The photo above shows Framingham’s Crispus Attucks Bridge, courtesy of David Strauss.)

“Big Chill” Lectures at Historic Deerfield

Historic Deerfield is observing the winter season with a series of online lectures on the theme of “The Big Chill: Early Environmental Histories of Climate Change.” The first takes place tomorrow, followed by one in each of the next two months.

The series description says:

From a centuries-long Little Ice Age to the global aftermath of the largest volcanic eruption in the last 10,000 years, this year’s series is devoted to early environmental histories and their impact on people and places. Join us for three virtual webinars this winter exploring how North American Indigenous communities and European colonizers understood and experienced the plunging temperatures and deep freezes, catastrophic flooding, and severe droughts and famine that became part of cultural memory and identity.

Here are the individual lectures—

Sunday, 23 January, 2:00 P.M.
“The Problem of Climate in Early Colonial History”
Presented by Sam White, Ohio State University

Sunday, 27 February, 2:00 P.M.
“Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World” [in 1815]
Presented by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, University of Illinois

Sunday, 27 March, 2:00 P.M.
“Snow Cover and Winter Knowledge of the Little Ice Age”
Presented by Thomas M. Wickman, Trinity College, author of Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast

People who register in advance can watch these lecture live via Zoom and/or watch them for two weeks afterwards. These talks are free, but donating to or becoming a member of Historic Deerfield while enjoying these public programs would be a warm gesture.

Unaker and the Making of America

The website of the journal British Art Studies is sharing R. Ruthie Dibble and Joseph Mizhakii Zordan’s article “Cherokee Unaker, British Ceramics, and Productions of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Worlds.”

Enhanced by many illustrations, the article begins:

In October 1767 Cherokee leaders gathered at Keowee, a Cherokee Mother Town in the far northwestern corner of the British Province of South Carolina, to determine a pathway to peace with the Mohawk and other northern Indigenous nations.

Their negotiations, however, were interrupted by a foreign visitor, the English merchant Thomas Griffiths. Griffiths had been hired by the potter and inventor Josiah Wedgwood to negotiate the purchase of five tons of unaker, a bright white mineral used by the Cherokee for millennia to make white ceramics and architecture.

Dibble and Zordan use unaker to trace the relations between Cherokee craftspeople, British settlers in America, imperial officials, Chinese ceramicists, and British manufacturers from the early colonial period through the disruptive Revolution and even up to the commemoration of the Roanoke Colony in 1985.

Along the way are geological samples, teapots, formal portraits, classical vases, and the c.1780 medallion above which shows, of course, George Washington.

Upcoming Online Talks by Holton and Philbrick

Here are two notable online events over the next couple of days.

Tuesday, 30 November, 7:00 P.M.
American Antiquarian Society
Woody Holton, “The Hidden History of the American Revolution”

A sweeping reassessment of the American Revolution, Woody Holton’s new book, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, shows how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters.

Using more than a thousand eyewitness accounts, the book explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. It also considers other underappreciated factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease.

“It is all one story,” Holton writes, and in this program, he will discuss how, when examined together, these perspectives broaden and revivify a story we thought we already knew.

Holton is McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. His previous books include Abigail Adams (2010), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize, and Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2008), a finalist for the National Book Award.

This event is free, but registration is required starting here. (That webpage says Thursday, but the registration is definitely for 30 November.)

Wednesday, 1 December, 7:00 P.M.
Lexington Historical Society
Nathaniel Philbrick, “Travels with George”

In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick endeavored to follow in the literal footsteps of George Washington: tracing his 1789 presidential tour of the new United States.

Just months into his presidency, Washington was tasked with uniting a nation of thirteen disparate colonies with very different experiences and thoughts about their new leader. Hoping to prove that the American people were not simply trading one King George for another, he made his way from Maine down to Georgia to meet with the inhabitants of the fledgling country and prove his mettle.

Philbrick’s new book Travels with George echoes this inaugural tour, as he traveled from historic sites across the original 13 colonies, meeting with reenactors, tour guides, museum curators, and others who grapple with Washington’s iconic status and contradictions. At a time when the American public, and museums in particular, are trying to make sense of this enigmatic founding father during a time of deep political division, Philbrick learned not just about this snippet of Washington's life, but the hold that his story still has on America.

Nat Philbrick is the author of three Revolutionary War histories—Bunker Hill, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane’s Eye—in addition to the National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea and other narratives from American history.

Philbrick will be in a virtual conversation with Dr. Samuel A. Forman of the Lexington Minutemen, himself the author of Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty.

The Lexington Historical Society welcomes donations for this event. Register through this page.

Reading “The 1619 Project”

Two years ago the New York Times published a special issue of its Sunday magazine called “The 1619 Project.” And the historiographical disputes it kicked up are still going on.

Not only is there an expanded and revised form of that essay collection coming out as a book this season, but so are multiple books that seek to refute its argument.

Most of the negative attention has focused on project leader Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, which begins, “My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard…” More particularly, on her take on the American Revolution.

I’ll quote the portions of Hannah-Jones’s original text that relate directly to the Revolution and the founding of the U.S. of A.:

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. . . . They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. . . .

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. . . .

The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. . . .

In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery. Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.

At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children. Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved people would never be treated as such. . . .

Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were the slaves — to Britain. For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypocrisy. And so in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he tried to argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and called the trafficking in human beings a crime. Yet neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the passage.

There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of Independence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications for slavery. The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved black people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run away seeking refuge.

The essay, having already discussed the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in 1619, then went on to address the ante-bellum period, the Civil War, the backlash against Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and finally the civil rights movement. The extracts I’ve quoted total more than 1,000 words, and they’re just one part of this essay, which in turn was just one essay in “The 1619 Project.”

Almost immediately, in August 2019, the magazine noted that this essay had made a common error in saying the Declaration of Independence was “signed” on 4 July 1776. Well, the text was signed that day, but only by Continental Congress chairman John Hancock and secretary Charles Thomson to signify that the body had approved it.

When we talk about the Declaration signing, we usually mean when dozens of delegates put their names on the handsome, widely reproduced handwritten copy. That process started on 2 August. So the Times scrupulously changed “signed on July 4” to “approved on July 4” and noted the correction, as good news outlets do.

I would also change the statement “The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man,…Crispus Attucks.” Young Christopher Seider was killed eleven days earlier in violence arising directly from Boston’s effort to resist the Townshend duties. Forgetting him is another very common error.

In addition, while Attucks surely had African ancestry, eyewitnesses saw as much or more Native ancestry in his appearance; they referred to him as “the mulatto” or even “the Indian.” Attucks might well be considered “black” today. Nonetheless, I think we shouldn’t omit his full heritage nor forget the European conquest of the Americas began well before the establishment of chattel slavery on those continents.

Neither of those details was what in these thousand words kicked up so much controversy, however.

TOMORROW: Primary reasons.

The Expanding “Eleven Names Project”

Wayne Tucker began the Eleven Names Project, as he wrote on his website, to look into people documented as enslaved to the Dudleys of Roxbury, including a Massachusetts governor and a chief justice, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By 1826, Tucker found, a crossroads in Roxbury was being called “Dudley Square” after the prominent family that once lived there. The Boston city government officially adopted that name around the turn of the next century, during the Colonial Revival.

In 1910 there was a proposal to name the square after Edward Everett Hale because no official “Dudley” signs had ever gone up. As if New Englanders need road signs! The Boston city council decreed that locals knew that place was Dudley Square and, more or less, that anyone who didn’t already know that didn’t really belong there.

Over the next century the surrounding neighborhood changed to become largely African-American. In December 2019, following a vote in nearby precincts, the city changed the area’s official name to Nubian Square. The Dudley family’s ties to slavery, both making it legal in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and practicing it, were factors in that decision.

Recently Tucker has expanded his research into tracking another set of enslaved people through the archives, those enslaved to two prominent men in Abington:

• The Rev. Samuel Brown (1687-1749), the town’s first minister and a traditional “Old Light.”
• Josiah Torrey (1720-1783), a wealthy farmer who married Brown’s widow and then married the widow of Brown’s successor.

Because Torrey’s death and will coincide with the Massachusetts high court’s decision to render slavery unenforceable in the state, the fates of this group of people also show how the local institution broke down.

Thus, Tucker writes about one mother and son:

Besse Goold was born into slavery on Reverend Brown’s farm in 1734 to the abovesaid Cesar and Flora; from whence the Goold surname came, it is unknown. Besse would in turn bear a child in 1759 named Brister Goold while living in bondage at the Torrey farm.

A search of probate file archives yields Josiah Torrey’s original 1783 will, said to be in his handwriting. Directly under a £3 donation to the Congregational church, he returns Besse her stolen freedom. Below that, we see Torrey returns the freedom of Brister upon his 25th birthday, which fell a year later in December of 1784. Surprisingly, Torrey further bequeaths Brister 15 acres of land.

Abington’s vital records show that Brister died in 1823, aged 63, where he is categorized as “a person of color”; luckily, his will survives in the archive, too. We see that he still owned property left to him by Torrey and that his widow Phebe is executrix of his estate.

The stories that Tucker has pieced together about Brister Goold, his wife Phebe Wamsley, and their children include preserved Native traditions, service in the Revolutionary War, and of course (given the nature of these sources) small-town bureaucracy.

That’s a reward of digging into the lives of ordinary people in New England communities: following all the connections eventually unearths a range of stories connected to nearly every part of society and nearly every endeavor.

I Am This Place at Old South This Month

Starting today, the Old South Meeting House will host eight performances of a new play inspired by Crispus Attucks.

Written by Miranda ADEkoje and directed by Pascale Florestal, I Am This Place imagines nine characters, played by actors Maria Hendricks and Dominic Carter, representing Attucks’s parents and ancestors through a century of life in colonial New England.

The contemporaneous record of 1770 has left us very little information about Attucks. In 1860 the abolitionist and historian William Cooper Nell shared a letter about the Attucks family from an unnamed correspondent in Natick, identifying his parents as Jacob Peter Attucks and Nanny.

Later authors linked, however, Attucks to Prince Yongey and Nancy Peterattucks instead, though the dates of their marriage don’t match his reported age.

It’s clear from how people of 1770 described him that Attucks had both Native American and African ancestors. In recent years scholars and genealogists have done a lot of work on how people from those backgrounds, under various pressures from British colonists, formed communities in New England. In other words, Attucks’s heritage was by no means unusual in his time, especially in the area of Natick and Framingham.

I Am This Place creates fictional individuals to explore the lives of black and indigenous people living through wars, slavery, epidemics, religious revival, and other changes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Massachusetts. It also, director Florestal says, shifts Attucks’s own “narrative from martyr to a man with hopes, dreams, ambition and most importantly family.”

Hendricks and Carter will perform I Am This Place at 11:30 A.M. and 1:30 P.M. this weekend and next for anyone visiting Old South. I expect there might be more performances scheduled in the future if the play gets a good reception.

Revolutionary Spaces plans more public art productions like this “to bring people together to reimagine what it means to be a part of America’s Revolutionary story.” Here’s the recording of a panel discussion last fall featuring playwright ADEkoje, Patrick Gabridge of producer Plays in Place, and others on the challenges and rewards of creating such site-specific drama.

The George Washington Book Prize Titles for 2021

Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon have just awarded the 2021 George Washington Book Prize to Mary Beth Norton’s 1774: The Long Year of Revolution.

The prize’s announcement says:

Mary Beth Norton has identified and richly described a key year in the revolutionary transformation of American resistance to Britain. She notes how the courts, the newspapers, the militia, and the assemblies were radicalized against the British.

She significantly demonstrates that other colonies were more outspoken in their opposition to the tea duties, such as New York and Pennsylvania, than Massachusetts before the Boston Tea Party. She shows that Britain’s Coercive Acts galvanized opposition and contributed to its revolutionary transformation. Her book offers a particularly rich tapestry in recreating the inter-colonial communications and parallel developments between the colonies.

1774 was the first year in which Americans sympathetic to the British be described as Loyalists and Tories, and to be persecuted by the patriots, setting the stage for a civil war that was part of the Revolutionary War. She makes the case that it was the year in which the Revolution became inevitable.

The Road to Concord presents a similar argument on a smaller scale, with the Massachusetts Government Act and Gen. Thomas Gage’s gunpowder seizure on 1 Sept 1774 leading the New England populace to move toward military preparation and outright defiance of royal authority.

The George Washington Book Prize highlights books about “Washington and his times,” defined as about 1760 to 1820. This year the nominees are even more varied in their topics than usual.

Mark Boonshoft’s Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic discusses the rise of academies between the American Revolution and the Civil War. They were a hybrid between a public and private system of education, receiving significant public funds but largely benefitting the wealthy.

Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War by Vincent Brown examines the largest slave revolt in British America, which took place on Jamaica in 1760. It was one of the major battles of the Seven Years’ War and remained a nightmare for slaveholders for decades, yet its significance was silenced over time.

Peter Cozzens’s Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation discusses the “symbiotic relationship” between Tecumseh and his younger brother Tenskwatawa. In conceiving of what Cozzens describes as the “greatest pan-Indian confederation the westering American Republic would ever confront,” the two men became “among the most influential siblings in the annals of America.”

The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a work of poetry that also functions as a historical narrative based on years of archival research. While showing the issues that Phillis Wheatley Peters confronted, Jeffers prompts readers to think about the artists who may be in our midst in contemporary American society.

In The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power under the Constitution, Michael W. McConnell explores the creation of the presidency in the Constitutional Convention. It shows how many of the prerogative powers of the British monarch were transferred to the Congress instead of the President.

William G. Thomas III’s A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War combines the author’s family history with archival research on the “freedom suits” in Maryland that put the institution of slavery itself on trial in U.S. courts.

“Raid on Township #1” in Monterey, 18-19 Sept.

This weekend, 18-19 September, the Bidwell House Museum in Monterey, Massachusetts, will present “Raid on Township #1,” a two-day Revolutionary War living history event.

The event description says:

Visitors will experience a recreation of raids conducted by British Regular Forces along with Native and Loyalist allies in the Mohawk Valley after the Saratoga Campaign. From 1778 to 1783, battles were fought all over upstate New York and the “frontier” over control of land that had long been in dispute between the Native Americans and colonial settlers.

Visitors will be able to view:

• two public battle reenactments (tactical demonstrations) 
• American and British/allied camps 
• Cooking and sewing projects, and talks on clothing 
• Demonstrations of muskets, artillery, and other weapons
• Sutlers (vendors) 
• Military medicine and midwifery
• The roles played by women and children who either followed the army or struggled on the home front

The schedules for both days start at 10:00 A.M. The tactical demonstrations will take place in the early afternoon. The camps will close to the public at 4:00 P.M. on Saturday and 2:30 P.M. on Sunday. Food will be available for purchase on the grounds.

People who wish to attend this event must buy tickets in advance for one or two days’ admission through Eventbrite. There’s limited parking, and thus limited attendance. A day’s admission for an adult who isn’t a member of the museum costs $20, but that daily price goes down if you buy a two-day ticket or join the museum. All kids under the age of twelve can get tickets for free. The museum asks that all visitors wear masks while on the site.

The Bidwell House Museum is set on 192 acres of forests and trails in what was once Housatonic Township #1 in the Berkshires. The oldest part of the house was built around 1760 for the Rev. Adonijah Bidwell (1716-1784), the first minister of that area. Back in 2012 I shared a news story about a museum intern cracking Bidwell’s cipher to understand one of his sermons.

The township’s original meetinghouse was located just to the south of the minister’s house, and both stood near the Boston Post Road. Later, the community split into the towns of Monterey and Tyringham, and then New England’s farm economy faded, leaving the house (expanded somewhat in the early 1800s) in sylvan isolation on the Boston Post Road.

In 1960 clothing designers Jack Harris and David Brush bought the Bidwell house, restored its exterior, and furnished it in late 18th-century style using the minister‘s probate inventory as a guide. After that couple’s deaths, their house opened as a museum in 1990.

Remembering the Work of Gary B. Nash

Gary B. Nash, a leading historian of the early America, died late last month just after turning eighty-eight years old.

This is from Carla Gardina Pestana’s obituary for Nash at the Omohundro Institute website:

Over the course of a very prolific career, Gary produced dozens of books: monographs both authored and co-authored, textbooks, edited collections. They were all written with flare and grace. His work ranged widely across the history of Quakers in early America; race, race relations, and African American history; and the American Revolution. . . .

Gary’s attention to race in early America has ranged widely but began with his path-breaking Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (1974). For younger scholars, it might be difficult to capture the shockwave that book generated, with its insistence that early American history can only be understood as the interaction among three groups, Natives, Europeans, and Africans. . . .

Gary’s contributions to the study of the American Revolution were varied, but his signature contribution was the 1979 The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution. Comparing three urban centers—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—in the years leading up to and during the revolution, he showed how economic crisis helped to galvanize ordinary urban dwellers to engage in revolutionary politics. A signal contribution to New Left historiography, it continued a line of inquiry associated with scholars such as Jesse Lemisch and Al Young.

In addition to his research-based scholarship, Gary was a fierce advocate for history education. His involvement in the controversies surrounding the National History Standards, which pitted him against Lynne Cheney and all those who want history taught as a simple and patriotic tale of U.S. exceptionalism, are well known. Serving as the public face for maligned history educators was only one aspect of his commitment. In his retirement from UCLA, he oversaw the Center for History in the Schools which promoted U.S. history and World history education. He participated in curricular revision at UCLA and more widely. He hosted workshops for teachers for decades, for which he became well known and much beloved among K-12 teachers.